Inspired by this post of Debaser’s in this thread on RW paranoia:
Well, that ain’t how I remember it.
Liberals gave Bush a chance. At the start of his term, their general attitude was, “Oh, well, the Pub stole the election, we wuz robbed, whatever, fresh blood, we were getting kinda tired of Clinton/Gore anyway, W doesn’t seem like he’s gonna do much of anything anyway, the country is thriving, maybe we just need a pleasant, stupid caretaker POTUS for a while.” And for the first months of his presidency it actually seemed it would work out that way. It took 9/11 and the W/Cheney Admin’s responses to it to start changing their minds, and it took a while – even liberals got swept up in the reactive hyperpatrioc anger/zeal for some time.
But to RWs, Obama was the America-hating Nazi Communist Muslim Antichrist before he even took office. Birtherism started even before the election (and damn those few cranky Hillaryites for starting the whole thing, never mind, it was the RW that picked up that ball and ran with it). Liberals doubted Bush’s “legitimacy” as POTUS because the 2000 election smelled bad, but RWs seem to reject the "legitimacy’ of Obama in the same way they rejected Clinton’s, only cranked up to eleven. Somewhere along the way, they appear to have internalized the notion that the Reagan Revolution was once-and-for all and after that, no Dem can be a legitimate POTUS ever again, it seems to them an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite Restoration. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was the most cautious and circumspect thing ever, compared to what Obama comes in for routinely these past four – no, five – years.
My recollection is that bitterness over the outcome of the 2000 election was directed against Bush early and often as partisan hatred, which was tempered by 9/11, and resumed with a vengeance in the runup to the Iraq War and beyond.
Well deserved or not, I think Bush got the shorter end of the stick on that one. He was, and still is, the butt of jokes regarding his intellect (or lack thereof). What insult can you possibly stick to Obama? Black? Yes he is. Intellectual? Yep. Aloof? Okay. Muslim? No, but so what if he were… I mean, none of those are negative attributes, are they?
Just look at this board, for example. People generally refer to Obama as “Obama”. Bush was routinely referred to by many posters as “Shrub”, “Bushco” or other epithets.
These two things both can’t be true:
“Liberals gave Bush a chance.”
"At the start of his term, their general attitude was, “Oh, well, the Pub stole the election…”
Either people thought he stole the election (they did) or they gave him a chance (they didn’t). You can’t say that people thought he stole the election and they were simultaneously giving him a chance. There were huge protests and lots of hatred during his inauguration. Going back to Michael Moore, he focused a lot of attention in his movie to that.
People on the far right hate Obama, often irrationally. People on the far Left hate Bush, often irrationally.
You’ll also notice in that post that he claimed that white men are discriminated against in this country, so I think you should take the Bush/Obama claim with a pinch of salt.
Haters on both sides also take existing traits and stretch them to excuse their hatred.
Bush is a bit folksy and southern. Haters say he’s dumb and a reckless cowboy.
Bush was born wealthy and worked in oil. Haters say he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. Conspiracies about him and oil abound.
Obama has a foreign father and traveled as a child. Haters come up with “birth” conspiracy theories.*
*Obama actually encouraged this by not releasing his birth certificate at first because it helped him politically. Moderates are turned off by these sort of extreme conspiracy theories. It sort of backfired because it went on so long the fringe birthers became more vocal and large than anyone expected they would.
As a follow-up, Bush’s share of the popular vote was 0.05% less than Gore’s, and Obama’s share of the popular vote was 7.2% more than McCain’s, so that alone doesn’t account for Obama’s 11% lead in initial approval rating.
That’s how I remember it. I think BrainGlutton is underestimating the effect the 2000 election had on Democrats, there wasn’t a lot of “Oh, well, they stole the election, but let’s give this guy a chance” in the air.
I think that’s a really good question. At this point in both Bush’s and Obama’s term, their approval ratings are quite similar, and the approval rating by people of the opposite party (what Dems thought of Bush, what Republicans thought of Obama) and spitting distance of each other.
On how people felt about the defining policy of their first terms, Obama is more disliked. Support for Obamacare is generally in the low 40% range, whereas support for the Iraq invasion started high, reached about the 40% level by January 2005, and then cratered.
In terms of personal attacks, Bush was ridiculed by the left for lack of intelligence. I think a fair number of independents also had some sympathy for that personal attack, though with less vitriol. I assert that you only have to scratch the surface of the personal criticism of Obama on the right to uncover racist themes, which I think is a far more outrageous and unacceptable criticism, but at the same time, it is a much less accepted criticism than the Bush is dumb thing.
I think Bush got more criticism for doing unconstitutional things than Obama did (though the criticism certainly is there for B.O.), and I think the claim that Bush was trying to become a dictator were somewhat more common. However, critics of Obama are more apt to call for “Second Amendment remedies” and similar allusions to violence.
In the end, I’m going to say that slightly more people has great dislike for Bush, but Obama is subject to a much greater degree of venom from a smaller group of people. Balancing qualitative and quantitative measures, I think I’m going to have to say that Obama is more hated.
ETA – I also would add that I think that Obama is more liked in general, but Bush had a larger group of die-hards who simply loved him.
The thing is, there’s quite a bit of white hot hatred for Obama. A smallish minority, but the level of hate is high. Meanwhile, The Shrub is generally despised by a larger %, but few hate him with that level of intensity.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying: They believed the election was stolen but were ready to give him a chance anyway. Those protests died down immediately after his inaugural, remember? Nobody seemed to care that much any more.
You also called that discrimination persecution, which is bullshit. You even said American Christians are “persecuted.” There’ll be another thread on that.
As a Texan I never gave Bush Jr a chance. He was a crap governor & a half-bright rich kid who had never done a lick of work. The election was stolen for him–but he was mostly following orders throughout his two disastrous presidencies. Basically, he was (and is) a mediocrity.
The racists hate Obama because he is a black man who won the Presidency fair & square. I’ve seen that virulent racism here in Texas (outside my personal circle)–but it is not limited to the boundaries of the old Confederacy. Many frothing-at-the-mouth fools apparently consider him evil incarnate.
(Nixon was the last Republican I could really hate; Reagan was just another mediocrity who, B-actor as he was, fooled more of the people.)
I didn’t bring the word “persecution” into the thread. The OP did. I was responding to that.
Go ahead and start another thread, though. But I think we’ve already established the problem in the first thread: What’s the definition of persecution? I agree that Christian’s aren’t literally being fed to the lions which seems to be the only definition that some people are willing to accept.
Given the makup of the SDMB this thread is likely to be an interesting mix of people claiming that Bush didn’t get bashed, people claiming Bushed did get bashed a lot but deserved it and people just popping in to bash Bush.
I don’t think looking at opinion polls is going to answer this question. The comparison is more than just the degree of approval there is also intensity.
From the start Liberals of course had a generally negative attitude towards Bush. They thought he wasn’t up to the job, was controlled by Chaney, was in the pocket of the Energy industry. After the patriot act, no WMD’s being discovered in Iraq, and it was revealed that the Bush administration had sanctioned torture and exposed Valery Plame the Left got a bit more shrill with some undesered comparisons of Bush’s authoritarian actions to Hitler but again mostly as a result of his policy actions than his identity.
For Obama, there have been calls from the start of his being the Kenyan, anti-christ, secret muslim, terrorist loving, anti-white, traitor. Heck even before he was elected there was the discussion of his terrorist fist-bump. All of this is far beyond any policy he has enacted, which is basically a continuation of the spending levels instituted by Bush and a watered down attempt at health care reform. Hardly the stuff to bring down democracy and yet people on the right are calling for armed revolution.
Bush was seen as an incompetent partisan based on getting us into an unnecessary war. Obama is seen as a threat to the fabric of our nation for basically being a black Democrat in the white house. There is no comparison.
I think one of the main differences between the two is this- more of the right-wing criticism of Obama is about who he is, while more of the left-wing criticism of Bush was about what he did. This isn’t close to absolute, of course- there’s plenty of criticism of policies that Obama has pushed for, and there was of course plenty of criticism of Bush’s background. But I think there are far more major Republican figures (Gingrich, Santorum, tea party congressmen, etc) now who continue to attack Obama for who he is (or who they think he is) than there were major Democratic figures who attacked Bush for who he was (or who they thought he was).
